Office Scenario Contest

[dead addict]

heh.. good times

Which many immediately thought was a great idea to make better use of their limited drive capacity...

... until users discovered that Microsoft coders were not on enough crack to properly write the compression utility .. the buggy utility corrupting many a data set made some folks a little unhappy with it. .. good thing this didn't turn out to be a pattern for Microsoft products.

Woohoo! it works .. at least it only took 4 months to make it work as intended ...

The initial problem wasn't with the logic of the compression - the problem was that there wasn't a utility included with DOS at the time that did a hard drive surface scan to find physical errors. Upon attempting to compress their hard drives, user ran into catastrophic errors if there were bad physical blocks present. While this could have been anticipated, and there should have been a surface scanner included with DOS, it's worth noting that the commercial competition at time was lacking this feature as well (irresponsible of MS to be certain, but their competitors had no excuse since the compression was their entire product focus).

The compression functionality was renamed and the technology associated with it was changed due to legal issues (a competing product claimed MS used it's compression algorithms - something I suspect was not true but don't have the full backstory on). They renamed their compression program after changing some of the internal technologies.

</boring DoS history lesson>

[converge]

Thinking back to the drive we would have had at the time, a bad block or two would have been the norm. Very interesting tidbit and myth buster.